Battery draining fast on iPhone 15 Pro

When you first activate it or do an iOS update, the iPhone always tend to drain the battery faster and this is due to the background process iOS does to optimize, including, but not limited to, syncing with iCloud, re-indexing your file system, photos, etc. (for faster search). This is normal and usually ends quickly, depending on the amount of data you have - the more data, the longer it takes.

I switched from 13 pro to 15 pro the battery draining is killing me. started a support chat and moved to call from apple support. He inspected and asked to turn off the home screen always on feature, that takes more than 25% of the battery. I turned off now and going to monitor for few more days, if that does not help the phone is going back to store (I still have 2 weeks time to return). will update if there is any change.

Hello,

Just a quick update.

I'd been having problems with fast battery drain and my iPhone heating up all the time since iOS 17 launched in September 23. Had the same problem on my iPhone 14 Pro, my new iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro that replaced it because Apple initially thought the problem was faulty hardware.

I've been through Apple Support multiple times, sent a lot of diagnostics, run the iPhone with just Apple apps, with and without 5G switched off, with the Always On Display always off, with battery optimisation switched off, reset all the iPhones on several occasions, and had the problem escalated to engineering before Christmas. Nothing made any difference.

I'd not heard anything from Apple Support since then and continued to have to charge my constantly hot iPhone 3 times a day.

I installed iOS 17.3 last night (22/01) and today the phone is basically back to normal! Battery life is back to how I would have expected it to be all along.

Where the battery would easily run down to 50% in a few hours while doing nothing and a 20 minute phone call would knock 30% off the battery, today I've played a podcast for 40 minutes, made 2 hour long phone calls, and used Safari without the screen becoming hot to the touch all before 10am and the battery was still at around 85%.

Hopefully I'm not jumping the gun here, but it looks like iOS 17.3 fixed whatever the problem was. Fingers crossed.

I hope it's the same for everyone else.

Like i posted earlier about the battery draining issue in the brand new phone, i went to apple store and complained abut it, the technician there did battery test and it came out good. He advised me to wait 2-3 more days as the device was less than 24hrs used. He advised me to observe for few days as fast battery draining issue is normal in brand new devices due to the background activity. as of today its been a week and i can see there is significant improvements in the battery life. I will still go there to do the second test for sure.

There is 100% a software issue when with Cell data. While they fix the issue I have found the below helps a lot:

1 - Under Cellular Data options>>Voice & Data, make sure you do not have "5G On" selected. Select "5G Auto" or better yet LTE.

2 - Under Cellular Data options>>Data Mode, select "Low data mode".

Please note the default was 5G On and Allow more Data on 5G for both options above, which meant that it was using 5G data ALL the time even over wifi.

Good luck, but yes apple has an issue that they need to fix ASAP. I changed from my Iphone 12 pro to this one because battery was a problem, and this new has has worse battery life.

I’ve noticed there’s a lot of things because they’re running in the background. One big culprit is Siri, I do it see anyone ever mention that as an issue, but it is an issue for the battery usage. It is actually turned on for every single installed app on your iphone and the only way to shut it off is to manually shut it off for every single app. I’ve noticed that siri is contributing to battery drain and when I took the time and effort to turn off every single app from Siri, my battery life got better.

Background refresh is another bad actor, even if you switched the toggle switch off for background app refresh for your device it still runs in the background for all apps that you did not manually turn that off for. Turning off background app refresh for every individual app one by one has helped my battery life.

“Always on display” you may want to turn that off. The only caveat is you have to press the side button to light up your display so you can use Face ID or passcode to unlock your phone. To be honest, I never liked always undisplayed because I’d accidentally unlocked the display and I’d accidentally butt dial people. The chances of me accidentally dialing people has gone down greatly and this is help my battery life. Those are some of the main things I’ve done to extend my life.

I get about 18 to 19 hours of battery life until my phone has to be charged at night. It’s not ideal, but it’s good enough for me.

you need to watch out for Apple iOS, updates, because Apple purposefully and maliciously turns those features back on in some of their updates. I noticed an iOS 17.4 this didn’t happen for the most part but in previous updates, I noticed that all these features turned back on all the time for every app. something you should watch out for

Have you updated to 17.0.3 already?

Anyway, best to check your settings (Background App Refresh) and also check if you have Instagram app - try deleting it first and see if the battery issue continues.

Good luck

I had a similar issue on my 5 days old iPhone 15 Pro (up to iOS 17.1.1). Battery would just drain several percents every hour even when the phone was idle, very untypical for an iPhone, which always had a great idle battery time.

In my case the issue was the Spark email client app on the Apple Watch (up to WatchOS 10.1.1). Once I disabled it, idle battery consumption became pretty minimal. The iPhone now behaves as I would expect it to.

The hint came from seeing that, on iPhone, Spark had a lot of background activity time. After reinstalling it, this activity wasn't showing anymore but the battery drain was still there. It's only when I disabled the Apple Watch app for Spark that the battery problem was resolved pretty much immediately.

I was very frustrated, hope it helps someone.

Solved the battery drain on mine by turning off ‘always on’ display and turning off app refresh for most apps.

Screen brightness 40%

getting a couple of days now with normal usage.

The store finally replaced my phone (pro max 15), as the battery problem got worse and it ended up completely dying. I couldn’t switch the thing on and it was just dead unit.

The replacement that I have seems to be fine. I’m only having to charge the phone every 2 days now.

It’s evident that this problem is NOT a software issue, but a hardware issue - more than likely a bad batch of batteries.

[Edited by Moderator]

Been in the IT game for 30 years and managed all Apple iPhone models. Currently sporting the iPhone 15 Pro with iOS 17.4 ran a similar test as yourself. Nothing remotely like the numbers you are receiving. Example leaving the phone alone for 2 hours, nothing special in settings other than turning off always on display knowing the most draining component of any phone or laptop is the screen, started at 89%, 2 hours later, still 89%.

On a nothing special day, phone is around 40~50% at the end of the day. Use it heavily, play games, watch videos and tethering then yeah sucks the life out of the battery and need to charge when I get to work (3 hour transit). All the iPhones and Android phones do if I ran heavy CPU/GPU games and tethering will drain them all. I haven't seen anything different with all the other iPhone models.

The iPhone 12 mini was pretty poor on battery compared to the new 15 pro. Yes the non-pro phones seem to last a little longer but I would expect that from any premium device to use more power than the other versions. They are the same size but faster CPU/GPU and more sensors running then yeah, will use more power. Just because you pay more doesn't mean you get a better battery.

I suggest you upgrade to the latest iOS version and perform a hard reboot, turn off always on display and see if it settles down. All of my new iPhones appear to drain the battery but that's because I keep playing with it as its new.

if you haven’t already one of the main battery killers i’ve found in the 15 pro max is the idle screen staying on and i fixed that by settings->display and brightness->always on display: off

i had to spend some time looking on my own because i couldn’t find anything here so i figured i’d try to help others

This may be redundant with other replies, and may be irrelevant to you. That being said... when I moved over from an iPhone 14 Pro to an iPhone 15 Pro, I saw an immediate and drastic reduction in battery life (on the order of like half). I spent a bunch of time troubleshooting to no avail. Then, I happened to notice a bizarre visual glitch in iOS Settings—VPN was rapidly appearing and disappearing and toggling on and off at a ridiculous rate of speed. I do in fact use exactly one VPN app and so for science I deleted it. No more mysterious battery drain. A day or two later I reinstalled the VPN app. It asked for permission to install VPN profiles (as is usually the case with such an app). This time, no weird visual glitching/flickering in Settings. No more double-rate battery drain.

My conclusion is that the app likely wasn't authorized to add VPN profiles anymore, possibly as an artifact/bug in the wireless phone transfer process, and so both the VPN app and iOS were furiously adding/deleting the config potentially a huge number of times over those couple of days. None of this was reported in the Battery section of Settings. I possess no logs from the app or the OS which might prove this, but the theory fits the facts.

The specifics are not likely relevant to OP or anyone reading, but the pattern of debugging by eliminating apps could potentially reveal otherwise hidden information, or even an outright culprit as in my case. Some of the activity on these iOS devices simply is not surfaced to the user in a way that could aid troubleshooting in these weird edge cases.

I hope this information helps in some way, both in the knowledge that this is real, and also that it's not always faulty hardware or unrealistic expectations.

FIXED (for me): Hi Everyone from Italy! i had a costant battery drain in may new iphone 15 pro max from the first day of use. Always had iphone and never experinced somthing like that.

I tried in this order:

• network reset
• settings reset
• soft reset of the phone

It slightly got better but nothing big.

• Theeeen i canceled tiktok-insta-facebook installed again after an hour:

Voillà the phone is now WORKING LIKE IT SHOULD!!! no more incomprehensible battery drain!

• (in addiction i also cancelled some small apps and update all, but i don't think those were the problem)

I had an iphone 13 pro max before so i know how it should behave.

MY ADVISE from my experience: delete and re-install all the app you have, from the haviest to the small ones and check the result!!!

I hope this can help someone <3, i was about to go crazy!

Best regards

I think i norrowed the issue to Data over 5G.

Under cellular data options try switching to 1) LTE and 2) Low data mode.

That should help extend battery life until apple fixes the problem.

At least that helped me.

Goodluck.